Computer aided or generated graphics systems are used in a wide range of applications, including information display, creation of images for photographic and printing applications, and computer aided design and manufacturing of a wide variety of products and components. Creation of two dimensional figures via a display media is currently accomplished in the computer aided graphic arts by storing large amounts of digitized figure coordinate data. Current systems of this type are subject to certain problems in terms of the size of memory requirred to store a particular figure, computation time for reconstructing the figure from the stored data, and flexibility of application in terms of ability to handle arbitrary shapes, as opposed to a limited number of predetermined shapes, and flexibility in editing and manipulating these shapes.
In these prior art systems, curve fitting or smoothing of figure data, if performed, is accomplished as a post processing step and not in real time while the figure is being created. Due to the large number of coordinates required to represent a particular figure, temporary storage of a large amount of data is necessary requiring a large amount of storage media and a significant amount of extra time to process the stored data.
After the digitized figure data is stored, algorithms must be used to convert the data to an acceptable format for presentation via a display medium or viewing device. The algorithms utilized for this purpose depend heavily upon the data base used to define the figures. Many display formats such as raster and run encoded, do not allow for efficient linear transformation of the digitized figure data. Polygonal approximation formats do not guarantee smooth edges when subjected to a transformation. Furthermore, transformation time is comparatively long due to the fact that all of the figure data must be individually transformed.
These limitations of prior art computer graphic systems are especially apparent in the field of phototypesetting, where high speed operation and the ability to faithfully reproduce a wide variety of character fonts and special characters are of great practical importance. Prior systems have been limited in their performance in these criteria.
The present invention solves these and many other problems present in the computer aided graphic arts.